Indie RPG Scars of War's PR is still confined to the developer's blog, but he again has some interesting musings to share, this time on motivating the player.
The general method taken to solve this tricky problem is to try to create a background generic enough to cover all possibilities. One player is the noble knight, the other a cold blooded killer? Hmmmm, how does one motivate both of them to go off and save the world? I know, family! Even mobsters love their mothers, right? Right! So we’ll kill off/kidnap their mother/sister/dog. That way the good character will be motivated to save their family and the evil one will seek revenge…
Well, that’s the logic that goes through a lot of designers minds, mainly beacuse they don’t really have any grounding in a writing background, or they just don’t think it through very clearly. Lets ignore the “If you try and satisfy everyone you end up satisfying no one” issue for a moment. The primary mistake made here is to depend on the player caring about a character they only meet for 5 minutes, enough so that they swear to save them/bloody vengence when the villain kidnaps/murders them. This is not going to work.
Now, if you tried to make the player care about a character that they had had time to connect to over the entire game, cool. That’s a well known literary trick. But otherwise the player simply doesn’t have the time to bond with the character.
Scars of War Dev Blog Update 
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